The Seckerson Tapes: Conductor John Wilson

Conductor of the sensational John Wilson Orchestra on recreating the MGM sound

John Wilson and the orchestra which bears his name created an absolute sensation at the 2009 Proms with their celebration of 75 years of MGM musicals. A total of 3.5 million people watched the broadcast live; countless more all over the world will relive the experience on DVD. Wilson has made a speciality of restoring and recreating great movie scores and presenting them in all their very particular glory in concert halls up and down the UK.

Electronica: BBC Concert Orchestra, Will Gregory Moog Ensemble, Hazlewood, QEH

Jonny Greenwood overreaches while Will Gregory strikes Moog-driven gold

I would call them burglars: musicians from the experimental rock, electronica and sound-art traditions who cross the genre divide, sneak into the world of classical music, pillage its more easily pillaged valuables, thieve its respectability, filch its original ideas, and sprint back breathlessly to their wide-eyed fans to show off this brilliantly clever "new" classical music (much of which is made up of techniques that George Benjamin would have grown out of by the age of six) in double quick time lest someone from classical music pins them down for long enough to inform them how rubbish

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Gekko is back to take on the sub-prime kleptocrats

The long-delayed sequel has earned no more than a small, insignificant footnote in movie history. Psycho II, Gregory’s Two Girls and Texasville, to name only three disparate examples, were all superfluous post-scriptums to much venerated, much earlier films. There is at least a pretext for another trip to Wall Street. Since Gordon Gekko last blew the fumes of his fat Havana in your face, money has learnt to talk louder than ever.

Buried

Ryan Reynolds finds himself trapped in a coffin with a Zippo and a mobile

He’s six feet under from the start. Paul Conroy is in a wooden coffin a dead-man’s distance beneath Iraqi soil when the flick of his Zippo illuminates him in the darkness where we’ve heard thudding and screaming. His oxygen, like the film, will last 90 minutes. A mobile phone connects him to his kidnapper, family and would-be rescuers. It’s the ultimate locked-room mystery, told from inside the room. But Buried is a curiously unclaustrophobic experience, instead opting to skip down sprightly, satirical tracks.

Tim Robbins and the Rogues Gallery Band, Union Chapel

The sound of liberal Hollywood works better onstage than on disc

Actors and musicians are always trying to swap places, often with hilarious consequences (as long as you didn't pay for a ticket). Madonna in Body of Evidence? Keanu Reeves in his inexcusable band Dogstar? I think not. But Tim Robbins is a thoughtful, conscientious kinda guy, and he can even claim a bit of a folk-singing heritage via his father, Gilbert. And he put together the impressive soundtrack for his movie Dead Man Walking. And he played a right-wing folk singer in the political satire Bob Roberts.

Tony Curtis Liked It Hot, 1925-2010

'I finessed myself': Tony Curtis as a young man

Another link with the golden age of Hollywood is broken

Tony Curtis, who has died in Las Vegas at the age of 85, made an improbable leap from Bronx street kid - the erstwhile Bernie Schwarz, who was always getting beaten up - to Hollywood icon in the 1950s and early Sixties. That he was able to do so is a testament to his determination to be an actor on the G I Bill, Universal’s willingness to put raw hunks of beef like him and Rock Hudson (a fellow Navy man) under contract, and Bernie’s own belief in his facile charm.

The Town

EDITORS' PICK: THE TOWN As we report on the second act of Ben Affleck, a reminder of the film that came before Argo

Ben Affleck's second feature fails to get beyond a ludicrous premise

Welcome to Charlestown, a Boston neighbourhood of just one square mile that has produced more bank robbers than anywhere else in America. Here crime is a “trade” passed down from father to son, and the height of ambition is to serve your inevitable jail time “like a man”.

Eat Pray Love

Julia Roberts takes a Sunday-supplement excursion to three kinds of paradise

Julia Roberts takes a long time to find her centre in Eat Pray Love, a glossy adaptation of the Elizabeth Gilbert memoir that, while offering a respite from the usual cinematic diet of reboots, remakes and comic-book blockbusters, ends up being just as simplistic and facile as its box-office competition.

theartsdesk MOT: Dirty Dancing, Aldwych Theatre

'Dirty Dancing': a class-crossing romance where the Fifties meet the Sixties with alarm

An audience that's in love with the ghost of Patrick Swayze

I suspect that more than half the audience that goes to see Dirty Dancing on stage has seen the 1987 movie, and that quite a few of them have seen the stage version more than once. There’s a strange feeling of being at a party where everyone knows everyone, and the party’s held nightly at the same house. It surely is not the misleading title that accounts for the wildly enthusiastic flow of fans - there’s nothing dirty about this squeaky-clean story, and there’s not that much dancing either. No, it must be that eternal celluloid magic, the girlish fantasy of entering a favourite movie and touching Patrick Swayze’s ghost.

The Switch

A flaccid excuse for a movie even by Jennifer Aniston's questionable standards

Step aside Prince Charming – there’s a new fairy tale in town, and your only substantive contribution fits into a small plastic sample pot. At some point in the last few years the Shangri-La, the unattainable dream of romantic comedies, shifted from man to baby. Hollywood started asking itself what happened after Happily Ever After, and the answer – they started trying for a baby, went through several painful, unsuccessful courses of IVF before he cheated with a work colleague – wasn’t pretty.